In June 2008, Tory MP David Amess tabled a motion in the House of Commons on the divisive issue of the UK’s relationship with Europe.

“This House believes that the Eurovision Song Contest is no longer a music competition, but is more about politics than about talent,” it began, before going on to argue “with great sadness” for the UK’s withdrawal from the competition until the format was changed to reward musical virtuosity over political allegiance. DUP MP Gregory Campbell later tabled an amendment that suggested removing the words “with great sadness”.

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That rather sums up the UK’s fraught relationship with Eurovision, which is a source of national pride for countries across the continent and beyond but viewed as something of a joke on these shores. When Amess tabled his motion, Russia had just won the singing competition, collecting the maximum 12 points from former satellite states Armenia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine. The UK entry, from binman-turned-X-Factor-contestant Andy Abraham, got just 14 points in total and finished last.

In this instance, the UK managed to effect change from within, and in 2009 a reformed Eurovision implemented a new voting system designed to allay concerns about political voting blocs dominating the competition.

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The competition now has two parallel sets of votes and points – one awarded by members of the public through a telephone vote in each of the 26 countries that take part in the Grand Final, and one determined by a set of judges from each nation. Based on these votes, each country awards two sets of 12 points, 10 points and 8-to-1 points for its top ten acts.

“It’s a lot fairer than it used to be,” says Jess Blair, who is Wales director at the Electoral Reform Society, and a Eurovision fan who went to the finals in Lisbon last year. “The old bloc voting has really hit a wall.” As Blair points out, Russia – one of the major beneficiaries of bloc voting, where countries award top points to their geographic or cultural neighbours – didn’t even qualify for the final last year.

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Others disagree that the changes are necessarily for the best. “In terms of fairness, there's actually more risk relying on juries than the public – juries are only five people, so theoretically one biased juror could influence 20 per cent of that half of a national vote,” says Catherine Baker, a historian at the University of Hull who studies the cultural politics of international events. “They might have improved perceptions of fairness in Western Europe, but I'm not convinced they make the contest fairer overall.”

There can be big differences between how songs perform among the jury panels and television voting, and how well they’re received in the arena itself. Last year’s Australian entry, for example, did well with the live audience and with the judges, but bombed in the public vote and ended up finishing 20th.

And while juries may have their faults, public votes are not necessarily “fair” either, with telephone voters seeming to vote based on almost anything but the quality of the music. In 2016, a group of Canadian academics surveyed more than 500 Eurovision fans during that year’s competition, asking what drove their voting decisions. Only 26 per cent actually voted for their favourite song, with another 26 per cent voting not for their own choice, but what they thought was most likely to win. More than a third of people voted for neither their favourite song, nor the one they thought would win – perhaps driven by “geography, culture, language, history or politics,” according to the paper’s authors.

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Voting for neighbours also may not always be a cynical political play. “There are good reasons why one country's entries will be particularly popular in neighbouring countries – shared folk traditions in a region are usually older than national borders, and singers or musical genres might already be popular there,” says Baker. “But votes from neighbours aren't enough to win Eurovision or even qualify for the final.”

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Last year’s winners, Israel, have no neighbours in the competition – although another factor in voting has also been cultural links between countries. Germany gives a lot of points to Turkey, because of a large immigrant community, for instance. One paper found a mild positive bias between certain countries – bloc voting – but no signs that European voters are systematically punishing the UK for being a bad neighbour.

The new system still has problems – familiar to Liberal Democrats and Green Party supporters – because not all votes are equal. In Thursday night’s semi-final, the difference between finishing 10th (and qualifying for this weekend’s main event) and finishing 11th was just one point – but that could have been due to 20 votes, or to 20,000.

The method of distributing points, known as the Borda count, tends to favour broadly acceptable candidates – if one act gets a huge majority in the telephone votes, the rest of the top ten receive a disproportionate amount of points. This means that songs that polarise opinion (think Jedward’s 2012 entry Waterline) can do well, even if the majority of voters hate them.

So what would be a better system? Blair suggests a modified form of single-transferable vote, where voters rank their top three, five or ten songs in order of preference, with the lowest ranked nations dropping out and second and third preferences being reallocated to those still in the contest.

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In a 2012 blog post, the Electoral Reform Society’s Chris Terry expanded on how this could work in more detail. Each country would still get to award 58 points, but these would be linked to how many votes they’d received from individuals – 10,000 votes could equal one point, 20,000 two and so on. Any leftover votes would then be according to people’s second and third preferences until all of them had been allocated. “This system would produce more proportionate outcomes and national bloc voting would be reduced as contestants could gain from encouraging higher turnout amongst neighbouring countries instead of just targeting swing voters in swing nations,” Terry writes – though even Graham Norton might struggle to make that interesting viewing.

Talk of targeting swing voters sounds quite silly to British ears, but Blair suggests that the real reason we haven’t done well in Eurovision isn’t because of an unfair voting system – it’s because we don’t take the competition seriously enough. Many other countries send popular artists, and many of the songs we’ll hear for the first time on Saturday night will already be smash hits across Europe.

Baker says those who want to separate the competition from politics are misguided. “The very idea of a song contest between different nations, celebrating 'Europe', is already political,” she says. Eurovision draws boundaries for what counts as Europe, and ideas about what that means will always be fought over. This year’s host, Israel, has attracted criticism and calls for a boycott over the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestine. “Eurovision will never be able to just be about music and not politics,” says Baker – so even fixing the voting system may not be enough to net the UK douze points.